Detroit Rising

Detroit pitch for Amazon: We've already been to bankruptcy court

Detroit's turnaround has made headlines, but the data shows that the city still faces an uphill road toward real prosperity.

There's really no telling what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos really wants in the city that will host his online retail company's second North American headquarters.

But if he's looking for a city in the Rust Belt that has already confronted its unfunded 20th century promises to municipal workers, some Detroit leaders think they've got a distinct advantage over rival northern cities, especially debt-ridden Chicago and the state of Illinois.

"One of the things Detroit needs to promote is unlike so many other communities, we've cleared our legacy costs," said Eric Larson, CEO of the Downtown Detroit Partnership. "You think about Chicago, which is great competition, but the reality is they have a very significant pension liability that they're going to have to deal with pretty soon. And that's going to be all-consuming, just like it was for us."

Simply put: Detroit already went bankrupt!

And in the process of that historic and tumultuous 17 months in 2013 and 2014, Detroit dumped $7 billion in liabilities in bankruptcy court, mostly through the elimination of an unfunded and generous retiree health care benefit.

Most pensioners received modest haircuts, and a couple of bond insurance companies absorbed the rest of the losses on money Detroit borrowed to obscure its own pension-funding crisis.

The $816 million "grand bargain," an unprecedented infusion of cash from philanthropy, corporations and state government, spared most pensioners from double-digit reductions in their monthly checks.

It also absolved Detroit of making full pension payments until 2024, giving the city a decade to get back on its feet financially as reinvestment into the center city started to pour in.

The grand bargain also helped avert what could have very easily led to years of bankruptcy legal bills over the constitutionality of the pension cuts — litigation that would probably still be going on today at the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"As companies think about the overall health of the region, they are factoring those kind of things in — what is the health of the state, what is the health of local municipality," Larson said. "And Michigan and Detroit have made huge strides over the last 10 years in getting ourselves in a better place."

To be clear, Detroit is not completely off the hook for pensions. And city retirees are still stewing about having their once-guaranteed health care benefits ripped away.

Mayor Mike Duggan's administration is already starting to squirrel away millions in surplus revenue to prepare the city for a $200 million annual balloon payment that comes due in seven years — a move that has won plaudits from Wall Street credit rating agencies.

But Larson clearly name-dropped Chicago because the Windy City's day of reckoning seems to get closer with every new report showing its funded liabilities getting worse.

At the end of 2015, Chicago's bond debt and unfunded pension and retiree health care liabilities totaled $45 billion — nearly four times as much unsecured debt as Detroit had when Gov. Rick Snyder authorized the city's bankruptcy filing in July 2013.

The state of Illinois' pension system has just $25.5 billion in assets to pay $235.9 billion in liabilities, according to financial data compiled by the taxpayer watchdog group Truth in Accounting.

That debt load comes out to $210 billion or $50,400 for every man, woman and child residing in the Land of Lincoln.

Economic developers in Detroit think Bezos can't ignore the uncertainty of how Chicago and Illinois will dig itself out of its hole (Chicago can follow Detroit's path through Chapter 9 bankruptcy, but the state of Illinois cannot, barring an act of Congress).

"You've got to know what those long-term liabilities are. Because you gotta assume that at some point in time that could show up in your cost of doing business," said Steve Arwood, the former CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

As state and Detroit officials found out in the years running up to the bankruptcy, the city's inability to borrow money at reasonable rates affected everything from fixing broken infrastructure and ambulances to cash flow for making payroll.

Those are factors any business considering an investment in Detroit had to weigh at the time, Arwood said.

"Detroit can present a completely different picture on the future," said Arwood, CEO of Miller Canfield Consulting, a subsidiary of the Detroit-based law firm Miller Canfield Paddock and Stone PLC.

In evaluating cities, Arwood said, Amazon's brass should be asking, "Does your community have its fiscal house in order?"

"If the answer is no, that could be translated into higher taxes for you," Arwood said. "And you don't know when or how much."